Chinese stocks: it’s utter carnage

If you thought the losses on Wall Street were massive overnight, take a look at the scoreboard below of how Chinese stocks were faring at various points on Thursday:

Utter carnage, right?

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index has tumbled 5.22% to 2583.46 by 9 a.m. Thursday, London time, leaving it at the lowest level in four years.

It’s now lost 27.3% from the year-to-date high struck on January 29, and is currently on track to record its largest one-day percentage decline since February 25, 2016.

Shanghai Composite Weekly Chart. Investing.com

Like the benchmark, all other mainland indices are getting smoked, especially small-cap stocks.

The CSI 500 — comprising of the 500 largest companies by market cap listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen — has fallen over 6%, outpacing losses of more than 5% for the Shenzhen Composite and ChiNext Indexes that are dominated by tech stocks.

In what sums up the session so far perfectly, the SSE 50 — containing the 50 largest stocks by market cap listed in Shanghai — is currently outperforming with a decline of only 3.33%.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng is also in the wars, nursing a decline of 3.83%.

Despite the sea of deep red in stocks, the Chinese yuan has only weakened fractionally against the US dollar as at the time of writing.